I Want To Be Writing

I want to be writing a story. I want to be finishing A Live Mind, or revising Electalytics (especially after I had such great feedback from my new writer’s group when I brought its first section as my first piece). I want to be filling in the notes I made about The Hero Mission, a screenplay (I think) about two astronauts that draws heavily from the mood of The Cold Equations and from a conversation I had with a friend on Twitter about the motivations behind heroics.

I want to be writing a blog about the fact that the House of Representatives are a bunch of twits who have, today, apparently spent their time and my tax dollars to – no, not resolve the sequester, or come up with some better ideas about gun control – vote that abortion should be illegal, with no exceptions, because somebody got the idea that at 15 weeks a fetus might enjoy jerking off. Talk about exhibiting a sense of entitlement and privilege.

I want to be handwriting letters. I want to send a letter to a cousin I haven’t corresponded with in a while, and an email to my sister (read that, it has a college photo of me) about trips I’m planning for the summer.

I want to reread the play I’m bringing to writer’s group on Thursday this week, and I want to read Cloud Atlas, which is one of the more challenging things I’ve put my mind to, and I want to read the collected works of Tolstoy in the beautifully-bound versions my grandparents gave me years ago. (See photo. I need to read those. They’re getting musty. I’d like to take a reading vacation and take these pounds and pounds of books with me to some island or sunlit hotel room, and curl up and read them all, cover-to-old-cardboard-cover.)

Instead I’m taking care of housekeeping – bills, calls, cleaning, and so on – because everything cannot and will not be done, and some things must be, and because I am not  a robot (no matter how much I like writing about them) and because in a few hours it will be time for bed.

And I may not get to write all those things – or even any of them – but I did get to write this one, and while this may only be a few hundred words, it’s something.

So for now, I’ll be grateful I had time to write anything at all, and get back to business.